Tree Saver - Tom Gear

It was the numbers that did it for Hampton printer Tom Gear. The numbers that told him his company was throwing away about two tons of paper every year.

"It was shocking to me," says Gear, who started Gear-Up Printing company nine years ago. "I felt sick over the paper we wasted for nine years."

To combat the situation, Gear launched a recycling campaign in his office, putting out trash cans to separate recyclable paper and trash. But for 41-year-old Gear, who says he has never been much of an environmentalist, that still wasn't enough.

"I just kept thinking, `what can we do?'" says Gear. "Then I thought `why don't we use it?'"

That's when Gear decided to not only recycle paper, but sell paper that had already been recycled. He depleted his supply of virgin 20-pound, 8 1/2-by-11-inch white bond paper in early May and replaced it with a recycled version of it, vowing to only sell the latter form of the most common type of paper in the future.

"You can't tell the difference," he says. "You put the two together and they look exactly the same."

Gear, who claims to be the first Peninsula printer to make the switch from virgin to recycled products, says that doing so is costing him 18 percent more, since the second-generation paper is more scarce.

Gear wants to expand his recyclable offerings to include colored paper. Client requests for such recycled products have been mounting, he says.

"The industry as a whole needs to push recycled paper," he says. "I think that us in the printing industry need to be concerned about recycling because we use an item that can be recycled in large quanitities. This is a way for us to help the environment by giving it back. Hopefully people will recycle it again."